I just recently finished reading "The Road," by Cormac McCarthy. I read it not because it won the pulitzer prize, but because after I saw and fell in love with "No Country for Old Men" I had to read the book. Having loved the book, the next logical step was to read another book by the same author. That's how I ended up here.

First of all, I really enjoyed the book. I read it in about a week. It usually takes me two to three weeks to finish a book mainly because I tend to read two to three books at a time. It reads very fast and easily, despite the author never using commas or quotation marks and the abundant sentence fragments. It's hard to have a problem with McCarthy's style because his prose is top notch and extremely vivid.

The theme of the book is actually somewhat similar to that of No Country for Old Men, in that the characters have to cope with a world gone mad. It is more understated in this book and is much more about the journey of the characters. That speaks to the overall genius of the book. McCarthy is able to tell a story about a father and son (who are never named) traveling through a post-apocalyptic wasteland and have it mean so much more than a simple tale of survival. In my view, No Country For Old Men was like practice for writing this book.

It was a very moving book. Masterpiece? I don't want to go that far, but time will tell.

Remember when Argentina's economy completely crashed? This guy was there and has some harrowing tips for surviving complete economic cratering. This is some real Time of the Wolf, The Road, type shit... Matt is probably very excited.

Huva, dödsabra! Rekommenderas å det grövsta.

"Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes" -- John LeCarre

Movies rarely compare favorably to the books from which they are adapted and almost never surpass them. Still, film adaptations of books can be fantastic if handled by the right director--take Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón for example, whose brilliant films Children of Men and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (adaptations of books by P.D James and J.K. Rowling, respectively) convey richly imagined, engrossing worlds. Cuarón's films join a small stable of adaptations that live up to--if not surpass--the books on which they are based. Most great film adaptations turn good genre fiction into great art. However, great literature doesn't usually fare so well. Geniuses like Kubrick and Coppla have reconfigured airport reading like Stephen King's The Shining and Mario Puzo's The Godfather into cinematic masterpieces, but has anyone ever done justice to Melville or Hemingway or Hawthorne or Fitzgerald (of the four attempts at translating Gatsby to the screen, the 1974 Coppola-produced effort is arguably the best, but consider how short it falls of capturing Fitzgerald's vision)? Which brings up the question: just how good, bad, or indifferent will the upcoming movie adaptation of Cormac McCarhy's Pulitzer Prize winner The Road be? We thought we'd navigate the pros and cons here.

What The Road film adaptation has going for it:

The director: Australian director John Hillcoat's 2005 feature film debut The Proposition captured the bloody violence and moral ambiguity of a world alienated from civilization. We loved the movie, and not enough people have seen it. The tone Hillcoat achieved in The Proposition seems well matched to McCarthy's grim vision.

The producer: Nick Wechsler's list of films includes Sex, Lies, and Videotape, The Player, Requiem for a Dream, 25th Hour, and Drugstore Cowboy--so it seems like he knows how to sit back and let a filmmaker create art without trying to, you know, have a massive Hollywood hit.

The leading man: Viggo Mortensen as the father seems like a great choice. Mortensen brought depth to the role he's most famous for--Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings trilogy--something of a feat when you consider most of his screen time was devoted to scowling, brooding, or chopping up orcs. He was fantastic in the films he did with David Cronenberg, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises (his bathhouse fight scene is unbelievable). Mortensen's a published author who started his own publishing house, Perceval Press, so he probably understands the literary gravity of The Road.

The story: Anyone who's read The Road knows that it's a sad and moving and strangely beautiful take on one of the most hackneyed devices of science fiction: the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

No Country for Old Men: The Coen brothers did a great job with No Country for Old Men.

Potential problem spots for The Road film adaptation:

The cast: We don't know much about twelve year old Kodi Smit-McPhee who plays the son, but we do know that that is a major role. Let's hope Kodi is more Jodie, less Jake Lloyd or (shiver) Dakota Fanning. However, Viggo's had pretty positive things to say about him. Ringers Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce are also in there, but there aren't too many other speaking parts in the book besides the father and the son, so it's hard to predict what they'll be doing--hopefully Hillcoat hasn't fiddled with the story too much. Charlize Theron is also in the movie. The wife character showed up in a few dreamy flashbacks, but was more of a shadow than a fleshed out character; again, hopefully Hillcoat hasn't chosen to expand the role to appease a wider demographic.

The story: Some of the best moments of The Road consist of the father's inner monologues on memory and loss and very few directors can pull off a voice-over successfully (Terrence Malick is the only one who comes to mind right now). Of course, this problem of language is always the problem of movie adaptation.

All the Pretty Horses: Billy Bob Thornton's leaden 2000 adaptation of the first of McCarthy's "border trilogy" is pretty boring. I'll admit that I've never finished the book, despite three attempts.

No Country for Old Men: Even though the Coens did a great job with No Country for Old Men, the book was still better than the movie--and No Country is, in some ways, McCarthy's take on a genre novel, the crime procedural. In this sense, the Coens made a smart move, but they still couldn't convey the depth and meaning of the book--again, much of it delivered via Sheriff Ed Tom Bell's inner monologues. Although The Road may appear to have genre fiction elements--namely, the tropes of post-apocalyptic sci-fi--to describe it as such would be a severe limitation, as would be to film it in such a manner.

The advance stills: Sure, they're grim and bleak, but are they grim and bleak enough?

Also, why the stylized cart? If you've read the novel, you know what I mean--the cart needs to be a grocery store cart, homeless style! Hang on--

--that's better! (NB: images link to a gallery of advance images)

Does it seem worth seeing in the theater?

Yes. We'll be carrying the fire on or around November 26th (and just in time for Thanksgiving!)

They were running on the plain harrying the antelope and the antelope moved like phantoms in the snow and circled and wheeled and the dry powder blew about them in the cold moonlight and their breath smoked palely in the cold as if they burned with some inner fire and the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such that they seemed of another world entire…Then he saw them [the wolves] coming. Loping and twisting. Dancing. Tunneling their noses in the snow. Loping and rising by twos in a standing dance and running on again…He could see their almond eyes in the moonlight. He could hear their breathe. He could feel the presence of their knowing that was electric in the air. They bunched and nuzzled and licked one another. Then they stopped. They stood with their ears cocked. Some with one forefoot raised to their chest. They were looking at him. He did not breathe. They stood. Then they turned and quickly trotted on. When he got back to the house Boyd was awake but he didn’t tell him where he’d been nor what he’d seen.

the crossing

Cormac McCarthy

My notes:

The ethereal grace of the wolves…the mystique and the charm…wolves are much maligned creatures, but McCarthy sees in them the same spirit Wordsworth found in his daffodils.

]]> http://stevenekholm.wordpress.com/?p=188 Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:07:22 +0000 newtraveller http://stevenekholm.pt.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/jag-tror-horace-morkar/

På torsdag meddelas vilken, vanligtvis okänd internationell författare som plötsligt blir substantiellt ekonomiskt oberoende och därefter drivs in i en akut skaparkris (läs Hemingway o a ) för att sedan glömmas bort.

Det är dags för Nobelpriset igen.

Horace Engdahl, vars samlade existens sannolikt består av 95% hjärna, 3% förgänglig massa och 2% blandade ädelgaser  - och därför inte KAN ha fel - har i år åter lurat hela världspressen. Helt enkelt bara för att han kan och vill (han har humor).

Hans smokescreen består i en avledande diss-manöver av den anglosaxiska litteraturen - och då särskilt den amerikanska. 

"Amerikaner är trångsynta vilket medför att amerikansk litteratur inte kan mäta sig med europeisk" 

Därför kommer det säkert att bli just en sådan. Horace kommer ut ur rummet i Börshuset med cowboyhatt och pickadoller.

Trust me.

Mina egna "trångsynta" Americana-favvosar just nu är:

1. Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, The Road och Border-trilogin mm,mm,mm)

2. Annie Prouxl (novellerna, novellerna...)

3. Mark Helprin (framförallt för en enda underbar bok, Winter´s Tale)

Kom igen nu Horace! Visa dem vem som har humor och vem som verkligen skrattar sist.

The characters provide, in and of themselves, a tale of devotion and love between a father and his son.  They protect one another and love one another.  In the end, however, I felt sad.  Good books will make you feel their sentiments long after you close the cover.  This was just such a book, but annoying as all get out just the same.  I was furious over the fact that I wanted to see how it turned out in the end, which was no end at all.

I moved on to the polar opposite.  Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos.  So far, I'm captivated.  I'm being swept off my feet by a beautiful romance that is syrupy sweet and tender.  I find myself smiling as I read and can't put it down, staying up well past my bedtime to read mind you.  And that is something that hasn't happened in a long time.  I look forward to making my way through the novel.

I don't read regular ol' novels.  I have spent many an hour/afternoon/weekend delved deep into the forensic creepiness that is a Patricia Cornwell novel.  Kay Scarpetta is easily my favorite fictitious character.  There are only a few in the Scarpetta series that I have missed, I'm sure the situation will be remedied.  I've also read her Jack the Ripper book, which was fantastic.  While I love her work immensely, I would never venture so far as to say that I feel good after reading one of her books.  I've read James Patterson.  I've even read The Lord of the Rings trilogy three times in my life.  Same thing though.  Intriguing, intense.  Not "feel good."

I love to throw myself into the novel and pretend that it is my life.  It creates a fantasy world to wrap myself up in.  I need a "feel good" now and again.  The real world affords so few of these warm moments it is for us to reach out and grab the moments we can and make them our own; take them to heart.  I'm glad that I am reading a "feel good" right now.  It gives me the opportunity to introspect on the whirlwind happy moments in my life and the people who make them possible.

Anyway, my point is that the cinematography and lighting for Blindness was stark and soft at the same time and exactly mirrored Saramago's original tone. It's not tranquil, but subdued somehow. Dispassionate? Maybe that's the closest I'm going to get. And with that comes honesty. Some of the scenes are fucking brutal. Highly recommended.

Bar-hopping after that, dude I met at Hi-Dive told us about a noise show his friends were doing over on Curtis. Just what I needed after the movie, even though neither of us even felt like a beer. Still. Reminiscent of the low-lying stuff of Mars Volta. Nice.

There's a contest at work to see if anyone can guess who's getting the Nobel Prize. I guessed Philip Roth, then this link made the rounds of the inter-office-email. He's high, but so is Joyce Carol Oates, and I don't think she's a bad writer, but I also don't think she's anything to be considered seriously. Don DeLillo had occurred to me, but he's too depressing, I think, for the committee (ditto McCarthy). I never thought McEwan and Murakami were distinguished enough. Chinua Achebe, Maya Angelou, or Milan Kundera wouldn't surprise me.

What's funny is that there's no list of nominees released, so this is all random speculation. I'm kind of wondering how a list of odds like that even works.

But it does work.

This one won't make much sense to you unless you've read Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

CLICK HERE to check out the Master Archive for any of the New World Order Family Circus cartoons you might have missed!

Managing Water: Avoiding Crisis in California by Dorothy Green (2007, University of California Press, $14.95 paperback)

Dorothy Green is the founder of some of the most important progressive water activist organizations - including Heal the Bay, the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council, the California Water Impact Network, and probably more that I am not aware of. I really enjoyed Managing Water not only because I learned a lot about water, but also, perhaps chauvinistically, because it's finally a statewide water book with plenty of focus on Southern California. There are other books that cover the whole state, but don't give as much attention its bottom half. One example of this is California Rivers and Streams: The Conflict Between Fluvial Process and Land Use by Jeffrey F. Mount . Please don't get me wrong - that's an excellent book, and I do recommend it (I learned a lot from it about sediment and the way streams are shaped,) but it's not so much about Los Angeles. Northern California readers will probably have the same criticism of Green's book... but then again, perhaps this bias may be justifiable in that Southern California has the most population, imports the most water, and therefore needs to play the biggest role in avoiding crisis.

Managing Water focuses on water supply, which is, unfortunately, somewhat divorced from stream health in Los Angeles (p.72 shows that local water provides only 15% of the city of LA's supply.) Green makes this connection by taking us through the basics of the Los Angeles River story and how we went farther and farther afield to import water. From there she details the various sources of water supply, and the massive tangle of local water agencies. If you've ever wondered things like "just what does the Water Replenishment District do?" or Green has the answers for you - see page 84. The charts and diagrams are excellent. I especially like the story that the per capita water use charts (p.168, 169) tell: due to the successes of conservation work (some of which Dorothy Green spearheaded), Southern California's water usage has remained flat while our population has grown.

I highly recommend this book. It has plenty of great information for folks who are new to water issues, and plenty of details that creek freaks like me can pour over. There is a looming crisis in California's water supply with sources of Southern California's imported water in decline, but Green remains hopeful that we can manage our water wisely for people and the environment.

Excerpt: There is enough water for our growing population, for agriculture, and to restore much of our ecosystems decimated by water transfers. We are that inefficient. We can have it all. We just need the political will to make it happen.

Rivertown: Rethinking Urban Rivers edited by Paul Stanton Kibel (2007, MIT Press, $22 paperback)

The book is a collections of essays about urban rivers. These include chapters on the Los Angeles River (by Robert Gottlieb and Andrea Misako Azuma), the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. (by Uwe Steven Brandes), the Chicago River (by Christopher Theriot and Kelly Tzoumis), City Creek in Salt Lake City (by Ron Love), the Guadalupe River in San Jose (by Richard Roos-Collins), the Army Corps of Engineers (by Melissa Samet), grassroots river networks (by Mike Houck), and the Mississippi River in New Orleans (by the editor Paul Stanto Kibel.)

Gottlieb and Azuma's piece on the Los Angeles River focuses on the story of the 1999-2000 "Re-Envisioning the L.A. River" the year-long series of events that was a collaboration between Occidental College's Urban and Environmental Policy Institute (UEPI) and the Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) - with an eye toward how this influenced the successful campaign for a river park at the Cornfields site - now Los Angeles State Historic Park.

All the essays are good, but my favorite is actually Roos-Collins' piece on the Guadalupe River. It's interesting to have a window into understanding some the complicated negotiation processes between agencies and advocates to move their project forward. It's actually an inspiring tale that, instead of ending in rancorous legal clashes (as are all to common in Southern California's water and restoration struggles), the parties were able to negotiate agreements that have resulted in a beautiful downtown river parkway and enhanced habitat for anadromous fish.

Excerpt: In September 2000, the final event in the Re-Envisioning series, a mayoral candidates' debate about the L.A. River and the urban environment, was an animated discussion about the Majestic Realty project [industrial development proposed at the Cornfields], alternative scenarios about the site, and general river renewal issues. Each of the candidates present either declared opposition to the Majestic project or sought to slow down the fast-track approach... The mayoral candidates' debate in turn suggested that the political climate around the project had significantly changed. "It is hard to adjust to the fact that the L.A. River has become a kind of mom and apple pie issues," [FoLAR founder Lewis] MacAdams commented to Gottlieb immediately after the debate.

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy (1974, Vintage, $13.95 paperback)

Well... it's a stretch to claim that this entirely within the theme of this blog... but I just read and enjoyed this dark and strange book and was really taken with a passage that perhaps invokes the primal power of a rain-swollen creek. Cormac McCarthy can really write! Where would our authors, our stories, our metaphors, our language be without our streams?

Excerpt: He crossed a fence into a half flooded field and made his way toward the creek. At the ford it was more than twice its right width. Ballard studied the water and moved on downstream. After a while he was back. The creek was totally opaque, a thick and brickcolored medium that hissed in the reeds. As he watched a drowned sow shot into the ford and spun slowly with pink and bloated dugs and went on. Ballard stashed the blanket in a stand of sedge and returned to the cave.

When he got back to the creek it seemed to have run yet higher. He carried a crate of odd miscellany, men's and ladies' clothes, the three enormous stuffed toys streaked with mud. Adding to this load the rifle and the blanketful of things he'd carried down he stepped into the water.

The creek climbed his legs in wild batwings. Ballard tottered and rebalanced and took a second grip on his load and went on. Before he even reached the creekbed he was wading kneedeep. When it reached his waist he began to curse aloud. A vitriolic invocation for the receding of the waters. Anyone watching him could have seen he would not turn back if the creek swallowed him under. It did. He was fast in the water to his chest, struggling along on tiptoe gingerly and leaning upstream when a log came streaming into the flat. He saw it coming and begin to curse. It spun broadside to him and it came on with something of animate ill will. Git, he screamed at it, a hoarse croak in the roar of the water. It came on bobbing and bearing in its perimeter a meniscus of pale brown froth in which floated walnuts, twigs, a slender bottle neck erect and tilting like a metronome.

Git, goddamn it. Ballard shoved a the log with the barrel of the rifle. It swung down upon him in a rush and he hooked his rifle arm over it. The crate capsized and floated off. Ballard and the log bore on into the rapids below the ford and Ballard was lost in a pandemonium of noises, the rifle aloft in one arm now like some demented hero or bedraggled parody of a patriotic poster come aswamp and his mouth wide for the howling of oaths until the log swept into a deeper pool and rolled and the waters closed over him.

He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?

When he reached the willows he pulled himself up and found that he stood in scarcely a foot of water. There he turned and shook the rifle alternately at the flooded creek and the gray sky out of which the rain still fell grayly without relent and the curses that hailed up above the thunder of the water carried to the mountain and back like echoes from the clefts of bedlam.

Here's who we're looking for:

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: the top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.

Speaking generally about American literature . . . he said U.S. writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture," dragging down the quality of their work.

"The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining."

I guess he's thinking about writers like Michael Franzen and Don DeLillo, which is fair enough. But if you ask me this idiot should just shut the fuck up and give poor old Cormac McCarthy his nobel prize. The guy's 75 years old: are they really going to let the author of Blood Meridian and The Borders Trilogy die without a prize because they think Cormac freakin' McCarthy is too insular or 'too sensitive to mass culture'?

The Road by Cormac McCarthy was published in 2006, and won the much coveted Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007. This is a difficult review to write because this is one serious and profound book, and yet I am compelled to find something shallow and humorous to say in what is a completely humorless book.

I was recently browsing the list of Pulitzer prize books to find something that would stimulate my inner literary genius, when I cam across The Road. 'Man and son traveling cross country in a Post-apocalyptic world'. Sounded fascinating and exciting and so we set out to 1/2 Price Books to immediately get started on what was sure to be an adventurous story. Afterall, Cormac also authored No Country For Old Men, All The Pretty Horses, and Blood Meridian which all became or are becoming motion pictures, as well as a slew of other popular books that I have never read.

Before I even cracked the book open, images of Kevin Costner in Waterworld and The Postman were already swirling in my head. These were awful movies, of course,but entertaining just the same and I was certain that The Road would be the God Father of all Apocalyptic stories. I was salivating to start reading and as soon as I read the very first page ...'Oh My God' I thought to myself. I quickly thumbed through the rest of the book...'NO, OH NO NO NO NO!' There were no chapters, there were no quote marks...just page after page of what appeared to be small lyrical paragraphs that were going to be just like the first page. I panicked, and asked my wife to listen as I read the first page aloud to her. "Did any of that make sense to you?" I asked her. Of course it didn't, and my worst fear was becoming evident. I was about to embark on a journey of some 270 plus pages of nonsensical poetry. UGH!

I resisted the strong urge to put the book down, and pressed on determined to finish the book whether it made sense to me or not. I'm truly glad that I did, because I really enjoyed the book and managed to finish it in just a couple of days. For me, the book was very profound, yet very simple, and deeply moving. How is that, you ask? Well, it just was and it is hard to describe.

The two main characters are known simply as the Man and the Boy. There are no names, and the region itself is relatively anonymous other than it is in the US. Some kind of undescribed catastrophic event has taken place in the past ten years, and the world is now a desolate gray place, unable to sustain life of any kind. There are very few survivors left, and in the midst of all the nothingness, it is quite evident that Good and Evil have both managed to survive and Evil seems to be running up the score.

There is no sun, no moon, and no stars due to the ever present ash obscuring the sky. The days are gray, and the nights are black...pitch black. There are no animals, no birds, no bees, no bugs, not even any roaches. The trees are all dead, the rivers are black, and the rain, snow and ocean are all gray. The world itself seems to be completely cold, silent, and dead. The man and his son are traveling the road south to find warmer climates, while trying to avoid the occasional marauding gangs of cannibal survivors. The boy was born into this world and has no preconceived notion of any other kind of world that existed. The mother...well, she is no longer around simply because she did not have the will to go on.

I'm cold

I know

I'm hungry

I know, I am too

I'm scared

It'll be alright

OK

The verbal exchanges are brief and to the point. This novel is graphic and disturbing in some of its literary images, and silent and completely depressing in others. It paints a grand picture of complete hopelessness and how some manage to eke out survival despite it all. So here is where I break down what it meant to me, and is not to be interpreted as the true meaning of this book at all.

For me, this book is about life and even more about death. It is about good and even more about Evil. It is about hope, but more about hopelessness. It is basic primordial human nature and how we struggle against the fear of death and evil within ourselves. The Road for me signifies Time, and how it continues on with or without us; How we are trapped by it, with no real choice but to follow it with only the slim hope that around the next curve or over the next hill something better is going to be waiting for us. Sometimes there is and mostly there is not, and either way, it is always fleeting and temporary. The only thing that the Road guarantees is that you will die here and it will continue on. The man seemed to represent that basic humanity as he struggles to remain human in the face of hopelessness and the imminent end. The boy, well, for me he seemed to represent the future; A future with no knowledge of the past, and the tiny glimmer of hope that good could prevail while Evil would eventually devour itself. The world that McCarthy paints in this book is our world and there is nothing in it that does not already exist today. However, he has done a magnificent job of simply stripping out everything, and I mean everything, so that the reader has to focus on the cold hard reality. Imagine humanity as we know it stripped of all distractions...no color, no noise, no movement...no love. Pure nothingness. The only emotion is basically fear and the will to survive. Where each day is basically the same as the one before, and everything hinges on evading the inevitable embrace of death one day at a time.

If that all sounds real deep and depressing, that is because it freakin' is. When I finished this book, I checked on my kids in their beds, kissed them, went to my kitchen and opened the pantry door and stared at all of the food and canned goods and thanked God for all of it. I don't even like black-eyed peas, and yet I am still so glad I have a can in my cupboard. I resisted the urge to start opening cans and begin eating like it might be my last supper.

Granted, The Road is not at all what I expected it to be when I read that first page. In fact, it turned out to be something entirely different, but better. It is one of those rare books that you read, and when you are done, you truly take something away from it; something that affects you, makes you think...and it is something different for everybody I would imagine. It is no doubt a lit teacher's wet-dream, chock full of all kinds of symbolism, irony, and other literary stuff, but I am not for one second going to try and tell anyone what old man McCarthy was trying to convey when he wrote this book.

I am very happy to see that Viggo Mortensen will play the man in the movie to release in November. Charlize Theron as the wife?? Don't get that since there is barely half a page dedicated to the wife in the whole book, but I won't argue about seeing Charlize in anything. Add Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce and you have a pretty star studded feature film based on a book that really has very little interaction or characters other than the man and the boy.

On a side note, one thing unique or irritating about the book is Mccarthy's writing style. He has no use of quotation marks or other important grammatical points, and therefore it is sometimes difficult to tell who is speaking or if they are speaking at all. The book is indeed written in a lyrical prose kind of style and I have the distinct impression that he makes up words from time to time, or just uses really obscure words to make the prose sound more intelligent, poetic, or whatever. At any rate, many will undoubtedly consider his style genius, but to me, it sucks when obscure words are used that I don't know or have never heard of. It makes me want to reach for a dictionary which then just distracts from the flow of the story. I personally find it pretentious and unnecessary, but what do I know? I am just your every day dummy who likes to read, and old Cormac is quite possibly the Hemingway of his generation.

Loved the book, and would recommend it to just about anyone, But you really have to be an open-minded reader with a taste for a bit of necessary gore and a hard dose of death and hopelessness.

This is really just my incredibly intelligent opinion, and I am sticking with it...until the end of the world and someone tries to eat me.

Dans ce roman de Cormac McCarthy, on est très loin de Jack Kerouak et de sa traversée élégiaque d'une Amérique à son apogée. La route de ce roman traverse plutôt un paysage de désolation totale, où plus rien ne vit, hormis quelques humains errant, rescapés d'une apocalypse prophétique, dont on ne nous explique ni le pourquoi, ni le comment.

L'histoire est toute simple : un homme et son jeune fils (jamais nommés), quelque part sur une route de l'ouest américain, se dirigent vers le sud-ouest afin d'échapper au froid et à la faim, et de trouver un improbable lieu où  s'arrêter et simplement vivre, plutôt que survivre. Sur cette route dévastée, jalonnée d’horreurs, ils poussent sans relâche un chariot d'épicerie chargé de leurs maigres possessions.

Roman poétique, exigeant sur la forme, ponctué de nombreuses phrases nominales, oniriques.

Roman exigeant sur le fond, sur la condition humaine, sur l’inhumanité de l’Homme, sa violence, sa folie.

Roman sur notre minuscule destin dans cet univers froid et cruel.

Roman, enfin, sur l’espoir, ou ce qui en reste, sur cette flamme dérisoire, sur ce feu et sur ceux qui le portent.

Le film tiré du livre devrait sortir en novembre 2008 et y joue, entre autres, l’acteur Viggo Mortensen dans le rôle de l’homme.

P.S. Je m’en voudrais que par ce billet vous soyez découragé par la lecture de cet excellent roman (prix Pulitzer 2007), car bien que sombre, on y tire malgré tout un réel plaisir littéraire.

Bonne lecture !

Set in a post-apocolyptic wasteland known as the U.S. the reader follows an unnamed father and son on a journey westward, dodging cannibals and marauders, where there may or may not be safehaven. We don't know the cause of the destruction but what has left me more intrigued is how the remaining survivors could have become so cruel, brutual and merciless. Animals are extinct, the sun is but a flickering candle that barely radiates through the thick and viscous air of smoke and ash and running waters run black and lifeless.

McCarthy's narrative style is almost Biblical and though the descriptions are vivid, the horrific nature of it all is almost unfathomable. Unlike most pop-culture, post-apocolyptic worlds/survivors in novel and film, McCarthy has really left the world with nothing--No makeshift machines for weaponry, use or transport; no eccentric fashions from unlikely materials and no sole saving force representative of the light at the end of the very long and dark tunnel. The father and son trudge through difficult and chthonic landscapes and unrelenting weather--filthy, freezing, starving, and with a sanity kept alive by the love of the other. As McCarthy puts it, "Each the other's world entire." They struggle to incubate the little hope they have for any kind of a better future--the young boy exhibiting an incredible sense of compassion and teaching the father that their goodness and love is worth surviving for.

Definitely a book worth reading because, like all great pieces of literature, there are messages embedded everywhere leaving us to believe that there is more to it all than meets the eye.

McCarthy was first highly acclaimed for his work, "No Country for Old Men" which he released in 2005. And in 2007, the film adaptation won an Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay Adaptation (Coen Brothers), and Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem). In the following year, McCarthy released "The Road" and for this won himself a Pulitzer Prize which indeed generates the excitement for it's film adaptation to be released this upcoming November.

The climax isn't important, right? I shouldn't be worried if I just wrote a bunch of crap at the end of my book, right? Right. Thanks. I'm distracted and tired, I'm not reading enough these days. And instead of thinking about the end, I've been spending my days thinking about the rewrites I need to do on the beginning.

Crap.

I need to rally. I need to get excited about this book again. Home stretch! Just a few weeks of edits and revisions. I need to ignore the allure of The Next Book.

And yet.

The next book is perfect. It's literary genius, it's virgin gold, it will change the way human beings read books, it will win every award in every genre. Gorgeous actors will star in the film. People at parties will pretend to laugh at my jokes to curry my favor. The next book is the future of literature. And why, you ask? Because I haven't screwed it up yet by writing it. I'm in a weird place. I need sleep.

I need...Farscape.

I love Farscape. I don't care what you say, Farscape is beautiful. Farscape is great writing, directing, and acting. It's deep characters with deep relationships. With puppets. In space. Farscape makes me laugh. Farscape makes me...well, not cry, but feel sad things.

I need sleep. And I need time. And Farscape. And maybe Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. And Joss Whedon on speed dial to say encouraging writer things. Hmm.

I don't need Philip Roth or Cormac McCarthy. I'm not in that place right now.

What do you need?

I grew silent.

Just a few minutes ago, I decided to take a look for myself. Well, it just so happens that I've read at least 3.75 of the titles on the list (I know that's pretty sorry). I'm counting the The Known World .50 and Elbow Room .25 too. Other titles that I've read include Middlesex and Color Purple. But what is most interesting is seeing which books you know in general. Have you ever questioned:

What do Pulitzer Prize winners get when they win?
There are 21 Pulitzer categories. In 20 of those categories the winners receive a $10,000 cash award and a certificate. (Source: Pulitzer FAQs)

And most importantly, somewhere on the front of the winning author's book will appear that gold "Pulitzer Prize Winner" seal. Gotta love that. Getting back to the original question, who were the Pulitzer Prize winners for the last five years? I'll do the research for you. How does a Pulitzer Prize winner began a novel (what's the hook read like)? See for yourself, starting with the most recent:

2008 Winner: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

[chapter] one
GhettoNerd at the End of the World
1974-1987

the golden age

Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about - he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock.

And except for one period early in his life, dude never had much luck with the females (how very un-Dominican of him).

He was seven then.

In those blessed days of his youth, Oscar was something of a Casanova. One of those preschool loverboys who was always trying to kiss the girls, always coming up behind them during a merengue and giving them the pelvic pump, the first nigger to learn the perrito and the one who danced it any chance he got. Because in those days he was (still) a “normal” Dominican boy raised in a “typical” Dominican family, his nascent pimpliness was encouraged by blood and friends alike. During parties - and there were many many parties in those long-ago seventies days, before Washington Heights was Washington Heights, before the Bergenline became a straight shot of Spanish for almost a hundred blocks - some drunk relative inevitably pushed Oscar onto some little girl and then everyone would howl as boy and girl approximated the hip-motism of the adults. (Read more . . . )

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2007 Winner: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark. (Read more . . .)

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2006 Winner: March by Geraldine Brooks

Chapter One - Virginia Is a Hard Road

October 21, 1861

This is what I write to her: The clouds tonight embossed the sky. A dipping sun gilded and brazed each raveling edge as if the firmament were threaded through with precious filaments. I pause there to mop my aching eye, which will not stop tearing. The line I have set down is, perhaps, on the florid side of fine, but no matter: she is a gentle critic. My hand, which I note is flecked with traces of dried phlegm, has the tremor of exhaustion. Forgive my unlovely script, for an army on the march provides no tranquil place for reflection and correspondence. (I hope my dear young author is finding time amid all her many good works to make some use of my little den, and that her friendly rats will not grudge a short absence from her accustomed aerie.) And yet to sit here under the shelter of a great tree as the men make their cook fires and banter together provides a measure of peace. I write on the lap desk that you and the girls so thoughtfully provided me, and though I spilled my store of ink you need not trouble to send more, as one of the men has shown me an ingenious receipt for a serviceable substitute made from the season's last blackberries. So am I able to send "sweet words" to you! (Read more . . . )

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2005 Winner: Gilead by Marilynne Robison

I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren't very old, as if that settled it. I told you you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you've had with me and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life. And you said, Mama already told me that. And then you said, Don't laugh! because you thought I was laughing at you. You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother's. It's a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I'm always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I've suffered one of those looks. I will miss them. (Read more . . . )

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2005 Winner: The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Chapter One
Liaison. The Warmth of Family.
Stormy Weather.

The evening his master died he worked again well after he ended the day for the other adults, his own wife among them, and sent them back with hunger and tiredness to their cabins. The young ones, his son among them, had been sent out of the fields an hour or so before the adults, to prepare the late supper and, if there was time enough, to play in the few minutes of sun that were left. When he, Moses, finally freed himself of the ancient and brittle harness that connected him to the oldest mule his master owned, all that was left of the sun was a five-inch-long memory of red orange laid out in still waves across the horizon between two mountains on the left and one on the right. He had been in the fields for all of fourteen hours. He paused before leaving the fields as the evening quiet wrapped itself about him. The mule quivered, wanting home and rest. Moses closed his eyes and bent down and took a pinch of the soil and ate it with no more thought than if it were a spot of cornbread. He worked the dirt around in his mouth and swallowed, leaning his head back and opening his eyes in time to see the strip of sun fade to dark blue and then to nothing. He was the only man in the realm, slave or free, who ate dirt, but while the bondage women, particularly the pregnant ones, ate it for some incomprehensible need, for that something that ash cakes and apples and fatback did not give their bodies, he ate it not only to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the field, but because the eating of it tied him to the only thing in his small world that meant almost as much as his own life.(Read more . . . )

When I finished writing this post, I told my mother that I was going to read her the opening paragraphs from the last few Pulitzer Prize winners. She must not have been listening, because after I read the first piece, she said "[Naysue], when did you start writing so high falutin?" I laughed and laughed before giving her Diaz's name. Then I read McCarthy and she made me stop halfway through the paragraph, asking "what road is he talking about?" I told her maybe we didn't get to the road yet. Her reply? "And we ain't gonna get to it tonight." As we moved on, she made note of Geraldine Brooks not-so-nice photo before I read her story. We laughed at the "phlegm" part and decided we'd read enough. After reading part of Robinson's piece and bumbling over the writing style, I questioned how people might respond to her opening paragraph at a writing workshop if an unknown/unpublished author presented it. My mother concluded with this sentence, "Is that your blog? Why would you post that stuff? Black people don't care about those people." I just laughed. I'm black. I care.

The truth is, my blog is about books and I can talk about anything related to that topic. Most of us bloggers have a focus or theme, right? Every black person might not be interested, but the ones who are are still reading this post right now. Or maybe somebody is saying, those are all good books, she doesn't know what the hell she's talking about---as usual. Maybe so.

Anyway, I'm sure you'll add a new Pulitzer winner to your reading list. Need more titles? The list continues--and the finalists list features a few surprises too. Well, I better end this post here before I start listing out the Nobel Prize winners for literature next.

Happy reading, ya'll!

British newspaper "The Times" referred to American author Cormac McCarthy as someone with similar interests. McCarthy is known for novels "Blood Meridian" (1985) and "No Country for Old Men" (2005), the latter made into the four-time Academy Award-winning film by the Coen Brothers, directors of next week's film, "Burn After Reading." In "Ten Things That Make Cormac McCarthy Special," Christopher Goodwin wrote in "The Times" on January 20, 2008 that...

CORMAC McCARTHY PREFERS SCIENTISTS TO WRITERS McCarthy doesn’t read fiction, and doesn’t have much time for writers other than Melville, Dostoevsky, Joyce and Faulkner. He doesn’t rate anyone who doesn’t “deal with the issues of life and death”.

I have an affection for the writing of American novelist William Faulkner, to whom McCarthy is often compared. The comparison is not without reason, given that McCarthy's first literary agent was Faulkner's editor Albert Erskine. My interest in Faulkner has less to do with issues of life and death, however, than with his stream-of-consciousness writing style -- even though the first novel of his I read was called "As I Lay Dying."

I struggled with the story at first, finding it hard to follow the jumbled narrative, the point of view switching from character to character and the plot leaping out of chronological sequence. When I finally let go of my desire for everything to immediately make sense, reading Faulkner suddenly became much easier. I just read the words and allowed them to settle slowly in my subconscious. By the time I was done, things finally fit together. Much later I realized that I appreciated the time it took to absorb the story.

Who is an author that you enjoy, and why?

What do you think of McCarthy's preference for authors who deal with life and death?

Te acabas de encontrar dos millones de dólares en el escenario de un horroroso crimen, ¿qué haces?

Correr.

Cormac McCarthy se ha consolidado como uno de los autores imprescindibles de la narrativa actual mundial, gracias a relatos como La carretera, premio Pulitzer 2007 o este No country for old men. Su enorme talento unido a una personalidad pública cuanto menos misteriosa le ha colocado en el star system literario por mérito propio. No es país para viejos además ha sido adaptada con gran éxito por los hermanos Coen, revelándose una de los mejores films de 2007.

Lewelyn Moss es un soldador tejano que, estando de caza, se topa con un puñado de cadáveres, heroína y mucho dinero. A partir de ese momento, su vida se convierte en una huida desesperada de las autoridades, los dueños de la droga y las perras, pero sobretodo de un inquietante psicópata para quien no existe el bien ni el mal, la moral ni la ética, sólo la fortuna. Y Moss ha tenido mala suerte.

A través de un ritmo frenético, en el que también caben las digresiones morales y los discursos metafísicos, un estilo espontáneo y un argumento cautivador, McCarthy construye una narración fascinante.

Recomiendo vivamente su lectura porque aunque nunca se haya leído una novela (como era mi caso) de este estilo, a caballo entre el policiaco y el thriller, el libro atrapa desde el principio y se lee muy fácilmente, con altas dosis de adrenalina.

No es país para viejos es, en definitiva, un magnífico relato que he disfrutado con un placer casi cinematográfico y que me ha descubierto a un autor del que leeré cuanto pueda.

Pd: Gracias, Ion, por recomendarme el libro.